"Mercy!" roared Praying Donald. "Eh, James, do not be deceiving yourselves! He will be just. We must be reaping what we sow. This place is sowing the wind and it will be reaping the whirlwind. 'For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.'" Long Lauchie came suddenly to the surface, this time with a precious pearl: "And showing mercy unto thousands," he continued softly. "Oh, yes, indeed and indeed, unto thousands, mercy unto thousands!" He sank again into the ocean of his imagination, and the tide of conversation flowed over him unheeded. "'Visiting the sins of the father upon the children,'" repeated Big Malcolm bitterly. He dropped his head into his hands and groaned. There was a long silence. These men were facing a great problem in the building up of this new nation, one which presented graver difficulties than they had met even in the toil and stress of breaking the forest. In the early days the social problem had not arisen; the settler had been too busy to permit of its troubling him. He needed all his time and strength to battle with this new land and compel her to give him his due of bread and shelter. But now, the stern young stepmother was yielding to those whom she recognised as worthy to be her sons, and was rewarding them with wider pasture-lands and waving fields of grain. Now the pioneer found time to draw breath and look about him. All through the years of weary hardship, homesickness for the old land had been heavy on his heart and his love for it had grown. And now, with some time for sentiment and reflection, he found his thoughts turning thither; old loves were re-awakened, old traditions revived, old enmities fanned into flame. The still wild stretches of forest called on all sides for wild, free action; the wind swept down over the Oro hills, straight from the vast expanse of the Great Lakes, setting the blood leaping for vigorous action. Little wonder, then, that in their first days of leisure men should go a few steps farther back towards the savage stage from which we are all such a short distance removed. And little wonder, too, that the wiser ones trembled lest their new land of promise, now so smiling, so prodigal of her favours, might be scarred with the marks of evil. And so, these simple seers, these men, ignorant in the world's wisdom, but many of them secure in the knowledge of One, whom to know is life eternal, turned in their fear and perplexity to the fountain-head of righteousness. "We must be having a prayer meeting, lads," said Praying Donald at length. "We could be having them all this winter, once a week, and maybe the good Lord will be sending us a minister."